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Written by Zunni
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Sunday, 24 February 2008 00:13 |
Ok, so February is here and this month an update to what we talked about last month.
The updates to the site/forums are done and things look/feel better around here. If you are a forum member and feel like something still isn't working 100%, PM myself or Rad4Christ with the details. (Please, be specific)
We have also finished the public WIKI. This took MANY MANY hours of painstaking writing, reading, revising, re-revising, removing, adding, copying, pasting, moving etc. However, the good news. It's up! To give you an idea of what's in there, it contains a large picture overview of the game, including design details, Feral class details, SNS structure details, and a bunch of previously un-released art. I could post all the art together on the front page in hopes of getting a big news site to notice us, but frankly.. I'm way more interested in giving you guys the skinny right now. You'll also get a clear picture of things we don't have done. Areas we are lacking <cough textures cough> which hopefully will bring a few talented individuals along to help us out. We've also kept back some of the specifics that are still likely to be revised before the first alpha release (Feral Weapons, SNS Weapons, and specific Upgrades) but fret not, the purpose of the wiki is to help ease new information into everyone. However, just because it's read-only doesn't mean I don't want to hear what you like, don't like about the WIKI, as well as any errors that you find or any questions you feel aren't answered clearly by the WIKI. You can find it at www.idmod.net/wiki .
The next site update is going to be auditing all our existing items up there at top right and integrating them with the WIKI in some way. (where it makes sense)
Onto the Tech Release update, we've also made significant progress in that regard as well. Khaim and Brackhar have gotten the code base up to date for release. I've pushed out some default map sounds (a few at the present moment) and want a bunch more before we release. The needed documentation has been started but has lost some momentum while we focused on the WIKI. We also have a bunch of props modeled and have found an individual who has begun texturing them. Currently he's working on finalizing the style we are looking for. But in the interest of information sharing here's the first 'take' of the SNS crate prop:
Hopefully this talented artist will stay with us and continue creating quality work like what you see above.
And finally to push this news release to the TL portion of TL,DR there is a topic I hear about a lot in Mod-making circles regarding the expectation of graphical awesomeness and it's place in creating a mod. This was originally written for the last news release but I cut it for the sake of brevity. So here it is tacked onto this one.
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Graphics vs. Gameplay:
I need to be clear up front, I truly believe you can have both, however expectations from rabid fans have pushed a lot of mod development away from really solid/tested gameplay and forced these mods to focus on the art assets of their given game. There have been many mods that have released that looked really good, but played incredibly poorly. In some cases it was the mod teams intention (their original game vision wasn't well thought out), in others it was a situation where the desire for good looks overtook the desire for good gameplay.
The focus for our development staff is making a compelling game that offers players a re-playable take on the RTS/FPS experience. One of my goals is to make ID a competitive (CAL or otherwise) game that requires a combination of strong tactics and FPS skills. I also want to make it accessible to new players and allow those who are learning the combat roles an opportunity to contribute in a tangible way. Because of these design goals we are working to ensure that as much of the game design is solid prior to any public release.
Art assets take a tremendous amount of work to complete, and require individuals with specialized skills. We recognize long term that we want the game visually to be as compelling as the gameplay is. However, I'm not willing to sacrifice the gameplay in order to solely concentrate on the graphical aspects.
So, that being said if we were to have a game that was solid gameplay wise, but was a little lackluster in terms of some of the models, I would release that game. Why? Because models are one of those things that are easy to replace using a patch and require no coding to support the change. This also gives us the opportunity to work with our community to create top-notch art assets without needing to recruit new team members and yet give those individuals the credit they deserve in the game itself. I really want ID to be community driven and this method will allow that to happen.
As always we welcome conversation regarding the game, this news post or anything else on our forums at www.idmod.net . |
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Written by Zunni
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Monday, 14 January 2008 00:09 |
Happy January!! 2008 is here, and the ID team hopes that everyone had a safe, but fun holiday season. We are expecting 2008 to be our best year yet and we feel like we are starting it off right.
In this news post I'll be talking about some of the things we are working on in the next little while, some of which are long overdue and some of which will help propel us forward.
As Rad4Christ mentioned a couple of months ago, we moved to a new forum platform and site design. When we made the transition there were a few glitches, included in those glitches were our media area, as well as a few oddities we are experiencing within the forums. (www.idmod.net)
1) So I'm excited to say we are making a very strong and immediate effort to correct issues and improve our user experience. If you have any suggestions for things to consider or changes you feel are important, please PM Rad4, myself or leave a note for discussion on the forums.
2) It's easy (being inside the project) to not see how things look from an external perspective. Over the holidays I had an opportunity to do just that, and I noticed a HUGE flaw. Currently we have bits of design scattered across the forum in a very hard to find format. So if someone was interested in learning more about our actual design concepts or specific game details (class information) there was no good way to do that. So with that in mind, I wanted to talk about a new feature that will be on our website in the next little while (hopefully within a week or two), the ID game WIKI. This Wiki will be a read-only Wiki at this time, but will contain all the game information in an easy to follow/read format. Included will be all the previously released information as well as other new information that we didn't feel warranted it's own news post. As we add new objects we'll make sure repeat visitors can find these additions easily and quickly.
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Ok, that talks a bit about the forum updates that will be forthcoming. Let's talk about the first real piece of technology released from the ID team.
Maps are the life blood of a mod, without good quality well tested maps, the most balanced game can suffer and be unable to recover.
We recognize this, and have come up with a strategy that we feel will encourage map development as well as allow solid communication between the development team and the mapping community.
The first stage of this is the Intelligent Design Tech Release v1. The purpose of this is to allow mappers to begin using our technology/design systems to create their own maps within the ID universe. Contained in this package will be:
1) Map Texture Sets
2) Ambient Sounds
3) Prop models
4) Mapper based entities (spawn entities, node entity etc)
5) Full explanation of Nano-Relay system
6) 2 Feral class movement techniques (scout and quick fighter) with full explanation of how they work
7) Guidelines to Feral heights
8) Mapper guidelines
This download will be publicly available for anyone to download. If you wanted to try out the Feral movement techniques, you could. However, the purpose is for the mappers in the community to begin creating the maps.
Part two : We will be asking mappers to share their development on the forums with all of us. As they build areas, we'll be monitoring and contacting those people who we feel have shown that they are capable of making a release-quality 'official' map.
Part three: These individuals will be brought (if they are interested) into a special area of the forums where they can discuss their needs and design concepts with the dev team and other mappers. We are also working on allowing these people to have access to updated mapper related content from the ID SVN (subversion, versioning software that allows us to update various parts of the mod and share them with the group from a central source).
We are working on putting together all the needed bits for this tech release and hope to have it out VERY soon. So keep an eye on the forums (www.idmod.net) as we'll be announcing there as soon as we can.
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Written by Zunni
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Friday, 21 December 2007 14:04 |
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First off, Happy holidays to everyone. Play safe! I had a long conversation with Khaim yesterday that left me tired. Not because the conversation was argumentative or negative, but rather because I kept asking him for progress on code bits, and his response was mostly, "in and working in a prototype manner". Knocked me on my ass, and my fatigue came from the adrenaline that eagerly flowed through my body. So I'm not going to say "Well, we are done coding and now only have balance and tweaking to do." because that's not factual but what I will say is there are many of the integral systems to ID that are in and working. Kudos to Khaim and Brackhar for working SOOOO hard while the dev site was down. On that front, a new replacement development site has been launched and Kevlar, Warchild and myself are hard at work repopulating the forums with information. It's not 'perfect' yet, but we continue to find pockets of ID materials that we are bringing back. The forums are also re-organized in such a way that I feel we'll be better able to see the status of all of our outstanding items quickly and easily. So this outage may in the end turn out to be a truly positive thing. We are currently actively attempting to recruit a few key people that we need to move forward with our art assets. One of my immediate goals is the design and modeling of all the weapons needed in Intelligent Design. While I was looking at our MODDB profile, I stumbled across this article which I found both amazingly accurate (in regards to mod development) and a little tragic. http://www.moddb.com/tutorials/24951/post-mortem I was able to understand exactly what the author was trying to say and know we've fallen into some of the same pitfalls too. This guide should be a MUST-READ for anyone thinking of starting a MOD. We also have a moddb profile setup. One of the areas of the site still under construction is our media pages, so it may look like we have nothing accomplished but an idea and a site but there's still some of our existing media online there. http://www.moddb.com/mods/6812/intelligent-design See all of you in the new year with more news about an impending alpha and some new content from the ID team! |
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Written by Zunni
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Monday, 26 November 2007 12:04 |
"News Posts... Activity... Updates... NS... can you say Irony?" - squeak
Never let it be said I ignore criticism. Especially when it's valid and makes a good point. I could share a flowery tale of our trials and tribulations, or make up some excuses as to why we haven't been posting. However, instead I'll take a more analytical approach and hopefully end up with the community having a better understanding of what the hell happened.
First, you may not have seen the one released video found here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Kfq8NIt-c . For our July post, we had a series of 6 videos that showcased the Feral movement as well as gave a simple example about how each team owning a specific resource location triggered different events. (doors opening, lights turning on/off, etc) I began attempting to voice over the clips and frankly, they turned out poor. Khaim also gave this a try and his were much better but we were unable to finish them. So July marched on, into August.
Those people who know me, know I work for a school board and as you can imagine, summer is the time for us to get things done. I was given a project to manage last year which was to automate our 66 elementary school libraries, I won't go into the gruesome details but needless to say, it took up a tremendous amount of my time. This left me with fewer hours to manage ID and development suffered. I take full responsibility for this, and have made a few changes to help ensure we don't fall down that hole again.
The most recent crushing blow was the loss of our private development forums. We had chosen to have an off-site location for our development discussions so if our public site was ever hacked, no development information (SVN logins, design docs etc) would be compromised. So bright idea WOO!!! Except we made a mistake with hosting, one team member (who I thought had been hosting it) actually had an associate hosting it. So when the hosting went down, and the domain came back up as a porn site, guess who was no-where to be found? So not only can we not use that domain for our private conversations any longer, the content on those forums are at this point lost, and may be lost forever.
So you figure with all these issues that ID would be dead. The answer surprisingly is no. We continue to move forward, we continue to write code and have systems be built. We continue to have models designed and hopefully we've found a new texture artist that will help us get them in the game. So if there's one positive to come out of this, it's the dedication and persistence of our Intelligent Design Mod TEAM.. We only grow stronger from here.
Just wanted to post this so people know what's going on, and why you haven't heard from us in a while. We are like the cockroaches of the MOD world, you can cut off our heads, burn us, freeze us, yet we keep crawling around. As always, you have questions, feel free to ask them, we won't hide from them and will attempt to take them head-on.
-Zunni |
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Written by rad4Christ
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Wednesday, 14 November 2007 11:26 |
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Hey guys! Thanks for being patient as we updated our site design. You can now browse the new site and join the discussion in our new forums. All settings, users, and etc should have transferred over, although some hosted images and files in forums may need to be reworked. Let us know of any problems, and look out for an update from Zunni soon! |
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Written by Zunni
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Saturday, 09 June 2007 14:00 |
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Greetings from the soldiers knee-deep in the muck of Intelligent Design. For those of you who know me and have known me for a while, I have a bit of a history of being outspoken and fairly brutal in my assessment of how things are going. I played that role when I was working on Natural Selection, and I'm certainly not above doing the same for my own mod. |
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